Home : Lakes
by phantom-jedi1
Summary: Home may be gone, but that doesn't mean she can stop looking for it.


_A/N: I'd recommend looking up "Kiss the Rain" by Yiruma and listening while reading. It set the tone for this short story._

The lake is deep, crystal clear, and broad enough that the far shore is little more than mist. It's also cold – walking along the shore in bare feet told her that quickly. This high in the mountains, the water never truly gets warm, ever fed by melting snow and the great sheets of ice farther north, freezing even in the midst of a sunny midsummer day. The mountains rise up to touch the sky, white and green and grey stone. It's beautiful, in a deep and serene way, especially in the soft morning light. A landscape worthy of any painter's brush.

She hates it.

The grasses are the wrong color, dusty browns and burnt oranges instead of vivid shades of green. The birdsongs are harsh calls, not sweet tunes. The sand beneath her feet is rough, coarse, not at all like the soft, powder-like grains she remembers. The scents on the wind are born of unfamiliar flowers, blooms that have no place in her memories. It's close, the nearest she's found in years of wandering, but not close enough.

The world she knows is gone – destroyed – but she can't stop searching for it in every verdant world she sets foot on. Sometimes, in lighter moments, she thinks that if she just looks hard enough, she'll find a secret doorway back to her home, like the children in the fairytales of her childhood. Look fast enough around the right corner at the right time and there it will be, as though nothing had happened.

As if it hadn't all been torn away in an instant, while she watched.

Sometimes, in darker moments, she wonders why she even keeps searching. Home, like so much else, is gone, forever beyond her reach. And yet…and yet she's here, standing on the rim of an unfamiliar world, straining to hear that faint sound of lapping waves on a smooth-sand beach. A sound so faint it might just be imagination, but a vital part of the memory, something this place doesn't have. Still looking for something that doesn't exist, that can't exist. A quiet quest to fill a deep longing born of a deeper loss.

Her companions don't understand her silent search, but she forgives them. Both could still go home, if they really wanted to. Too many painful memories live there for either of them to truly consider it, but at least for them the option is open. For her, there is no going home. This difference between them takes many subtle forms, but right now it means they're back at the lodge, relaxing, enjoying the all-too-brief respite from their duties. She, on the other hand, woke before the dawn with a restless spirit and a fierce need to walk along shores that only exist in her memory. Setting out along this placid lake was meant to be a substitute, but as breathtaking as the views are here, they pale in comparison to those written on her heart. No matter how far she walks, it's still not home.

Home was forfeit the moment she joined the fight. She just didn't know it then.

So much lost, in that fight to save everything, so many lives and dreams and hopes. Next to that, losing the ability to walk along her favorite beach seems small. Trivial, even, yet it hurts in ways she doesn't fully understand. Yes, a great and terrible evil had been beaten back, but at times like this the cost weighs heavily on her. Wearied, she gives in and sits down in the sand, watching tiny waves try to reach her toes but never quite succeeding.

Was it worth it, in the end, all the sacrifices they had made?

She tells herself firmly that it was. The galaxy had a chance at peace, at stability, at freedom, that it could never have had otherwise. Surely that was worth any cost, any sacrifice. The good of trillions against the sorrows of the few. Most of the time, she can even believe it.

But right now, so homesick she could nearly die, she thinks that she might trade it all to see one more sunrise lighting the graceful towers and tumbling waterfalls of her home. Or to listen to her (adoptive) father tell stories about how the worlds were created, legends passed down from father to daughter, mother to son. In her mind's eye, she walks along those paths, laughing, basking in the glow of her family's love. For a breathless moment, lost in memory, she can almost remember what it was like.

But then her friends' worried calls bring her back to the present, to this almost-right world that is still not right enough. With a sigh she stands, brushes the grey sand from her clothes, and heads back the way she came. Back to her friends, back to her duties, back to a galaxy that is still broken, but slowly healing itself from the war that destroyed so much.

Maybe the next world would feel like home.


End file.
